The purpose of the invention is to produce a multipurpose machine capable of both simultaneously winding and laying down several fiber rovings on a given support and more specifically a further large number of rovings.
In this description, fiber roving means a group of continuous agglomerated fibers in the form of a strip or band stored on a spool.
There already exist various machines able to wind or lay down several preimpregnated rovings at the same time.
FP-A-O 361 828 describes a machine for laying down several rovings disposed in a lap and applied by a mobile head along several axes and supported by a gantry and disposed in such a way as to lay down the rovings on a rotation body around a horizontal axis.
The rovings are unwound from the spools embarked on the mobile head carrier mounting harness.
This disposition is expressed by a significant spatial requirement and weight of the mobile mounting harness bearing the spools, thus considerably limitating the number of distinct rovings to be laid down and the movement capacities in the space of the laying down head.
According to another drawback, if any problem occurs on one of the spools, such as a roving breaking, accessibility to the spool for repair poses a delicate problem, especially if the piece being laid out is large.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,679,291 concerns a given type of gantry machine for contact laying down fibers on the wall of a fixed mould. This machine has the same drawbacks, even more significant as regards the movement and positioning capacities of the laying down head and accessibility to the spools of fibers owing to the fact that the piece to be laid out is immobile and has extremely large dimensions.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,699,683 also discloses a gantry machine for the simultaneous laying down of a plurality of rovings on an element with the aid of an applying device borne by a multi-axes laying down head disposed in such a way as to support the fiber spools.
This disposition considerably adds weight to the laying down head, renders it less maneuverable and less able to be positioned in the air. In this respect, it should be noted that the mobility of the laying down head is possible along the three Cartesian directions X,Y,Z and only two spin axes, vertically horizontally and orthogonally to the axis of the device applying the rovings, which thus limits the possibilities of laying down of the head which can thus only rotate around one axis parallel to that of the applying device.